The decision was very civilized and logical, and ultimately correct, but it was a damaging period for me. I didn’t have many friends in Los Angeles at that point, but those I did have knew how to have a good time and so did I. A life of pretty much unbridled debauchery followed, made easier by the fact that I never really had to get up in the morning, because the work that had been flowing so freely for the last few years suddenly went dry.
Part of this was due to the fact that the films I had done, with the exception of Risky Business and, arguably, Revenge of the Nerds, had not exactly set the world on fire. They had all been received tepidly, and while the first two had done well at the box office, the rest had been unmitigated disasters. It seems hard to imagine that films like this and Better Off Dead could have been seen as anything less than successes given their legendary status now, but that was the reality.
There had been loose talk about doing a sequel to Revenge of the Nerds ever since it opened. But the company who owned the rights to make that happen, Interscope, was blocked by 20th Century Fox, whose new administration had a strict no-sequel policy and hadn’t been a fan of the movie in the first place.
The end result for me personally was that I had been working steadily but not in what you might call prestige motion pictures. Clan of the Cave Bear had been a disaster. (My favorite bad-review headline was from Time magazine: “When Is a Bear a Dog?”) I don’t even remember Bad Medicine opening in theaters at all, though it wasn’t in them for long and I may just have missed it. I was auditioning for things but not being cast in them. I was beginning to think I’d lost the knack of auditioning. It was like the early days in New York, when I was just starting out, struggling to find who I was as an actor and what I had to offer. I did something I had never done before. I started turning down auditions because they frightened me. I would only go in on jobs for which I was perfect. I would reject anything that seemed against type at a time when those were the very roles I should have been working hardest to get.
Months passed like this. I was living on my savings and those were dwindling to a pretty alarming degree. I was seriously considering moving back to New York and trying to pick up where I’d left off in the theater. I was feeling that my initial instincts were being daily proven correct: I was never meant to be a film actor, it was wrong for me. I should’ve stayed in the theater, where I belonged. The following spring, while Cynthia was working out of town, I went back to spend a few weeks in our old apartment.
John Cusack was in New York, too, renting a two-bedroom apartment on University Place in the Village with his friend and one-man entourage Jeremy Piven. We spent weeks together, culminating in a night at the Bitter End where Bobcat Goldthwait, who was rapidly becoming the hottest comedian walking, was doing his act.
Bobcat, as usual, was brilliant, but as the show was winding down and we were headed backstage to congratulate him, John spied Savage Steve in the crowd. That was enough for him and he fled the place without a word, Jeremy in tow. I went and greeted Savage and we went backstage together.
It was crowded with Bobcat’s fans, including Richard Belzer, with whom I sat while Bobcat dealt with the mob. Finally, Savage approached him and the two started an intense conversation. It turned out that Savage was there to try to persuade Bobcat to publicize One Crazy Summer. “I’m desperate,” we heard him say. “John’s not talking to me, Demi wants nothing to do with it. You steal the movie. If I can’t get you to do press, it’s not going to have a chance.”
Bobcat was polite but regretful, and Savage could look for no help from him. I don’t know what his reasons were: whether he didn’t want to publicize a movie that the film’s stars wouldn’t touch, whether his own burgeoning movie career made it impossible or what. But he wasn’t buying.
“God,” Belzer murmured to me, “this is just painful.”
Savage left dejected and so did I. I returned to L.A. shortly after that. As much as I loved New York, I didn’t have enough money to come back to try to start over. Things weren’t looking promising in L.A. but I had to try.
Then one day, shortly after my return, I was submitted for three auditions in the same day. Unprecedented! With a newfound energy and enthusiasm born of desperation and looming poverty, I flung myself into all three.
One was a television movie starring Ed Asner. I liked Ed Asner! I remember nothing about the role I was reading for, but it was young and quirky and who did young and quirky better than me? The second was for John Hughes’s new film with Kevin Bacon. I don’t even remember which movie it was, let alone what the part was, but John Hughes made total sense to me. This was right in my wheelhouse! Having done a string of cult youth-oriented pictures, I figured it was only a matter of time before John Hughes came calling. These were the two auditions that I put most of my focus on. The third was certainly the least promising of the bunch. The potential love interest of a regular character on a television show that I had never seen, but a lot of people were talking about. Love interest? I remember discussing this with my agent, who was very excited about the audition. I hastened to assure her that there was no use in my even showing up for it. I had never played love interest to anyone. No one would buy me as a love interest to anyone. I was feeling particularly dumpy and unattractive and felt we should just stick to dumpy, unattractive parts, like Booger and Charles De Mar.
For once, my agent wouldn’t take my bullshit and demanded I do the audition.
So I went into the Ed Asner project and blew the audition. For once, my youthful quirkiness wasn’t enough. It was one of those times where you’ve prepared for the thing and then you start in on it in the room and it’s like an out-of-body experience. Almost like the classic actor’s nightmare where you’re onstage opening night and realize you don’t know the lines and missed all the rehearsals.
But I wrote that one off, pulled myself together and went on to read for John Hughes and Kevin Bacon. Honestly, I was completely taken aback to see I was actually reading with Kevin Bacon. The two men were welcoming and very nice and clearly were familiar with my work: in short, a love fest. Then I started reading. It began badly and went downhill from there. At some point during the audition I swear it got so quiet in that room I could hear Hughes’s watch ticking. Their faces were frozen masks of encouragement.
Then, as the sun was setting, with despair and humiliation overwhelming me, I went in to read for the part of Herbert Viola on Moonlighting. The love interest one; the one I had no business reading for.
That one, I nailed.
MOONLIGHTING
LOS ANGELES, 1987–1989
When I came in to read that day, I wasn’t reading for the part of Herbert Viola. I was reading from a script that had already been filmed and broadcast, an episode that had featured Allyce Beasley’s poetry-spouting receptionist Ms. DiPesto prominently. They always had at least one of these episodes—called “DiPesto episodes”—every season, usually around Christmas so Cybill and Bruce could get their parts shot in a day and then get a long holiday. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this particular episode had featured Allyce’s then-husband, Vincent Schiavelli, with whom I had worked on Better Off Dead.
The current episode, called “Yours Very Deadly,” introduced my character, Herbert Viola, specifically as a temp. The reason for this, obviously, was to see how I came off. Did I work well with Allyce, and did I get along with Bruce and Cybill? And there was one other element that needed to be sorted out. Was I going to be “difficult”?
Maybe the despair and hopelessness I was feeling the day I auditioned helped. It does sometimes. There are times when, overcome with anger or sadness, actors can read with a depth or energy that they could never have brought to it on a good day. Whatever. I read well. But in this case, it wasn’t just a good audition that saved the day. It turned out I also had Risky Business to thank for Moonlighting.
Moonlighting had already been on for a season at that point. The show’s creator and mastermind, Glen Gordon Caron, had put t
ogether what was later described as a “placebo detective show.” It had nothing to do with cops or crime or solving mysteries. The mysteries, often as not, made no sense at all. The crimes were mainly there to showcase the talents of its two mismatched lead characters, Maddie Hayes and David Addison. But there was a problem. There was no ensemble cast to shoulder the work on Moonlighting. There was just Shepherd and Willis getting the lion’s share of the screen time every week, and it had become clear that another character was going to be needed to work with DiPesto, to be part of a B story and provide a secondary, less sexually charged relationship for viewers to follow and to take some of the pressure off the two stars. Once Glen started thinking about who would be a good choice for this, he started thinking about me because, like Jeff Kanew and Savage Steve Holland before him, he was a fan of Risky Business. It struck him that the “what the fuck” guy might fit the role perfectly.
Cybill Shepherd already had a long reputation as a diva and after a brief honeymoon period on Moonlighting was reverting to type. Bruce, on the other hand, was as funny, laid-back and casual off screen as he was on … for now. That would change. But Glen wanted to make certain that whomever he brought onto the show was going to be easy to handle and “professional.” So he called Jon Avnet, producer of Risky Business, and asked what I was like to work with.
Fortunately, I received a stellar recommendation from Jon, who again told the story of how I was able to repeat a performance exactly over a period of three months, as if I had been able to turn water into wine. While I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I was in.
* * *
Being cast as Viola on Moonlighting was the beginning of a remarkable phase in my career. It marked the end of almost a year of unemployment. Exciting, gratifying, infuriating, exasperating, exhausting and, finally, heartbreaking, it was a job that lasted two and a half years: a blink of an eye to actors who land television roles that can last ten years or more, but to me it seemed like a lifetime. I divorced my first wife shortly after it began and met my future second wife shortly after it was over.
With one exception—Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise, which will be dealt with in it’s own chapter, out of order—I didn’t make another feature film for almost five years. Having gone so long without ever having appeared on television, my career now basically became about being on television. Except for our summer breaks, when I would flee to Fayetteville, Pennsylvania, to do summer stock at Totem Pole Playhouse, my professional life consisted exclusively of playing Viola on a critically acclaimed and enormously popular television show.
On the day of the reading—having already twice proved that auditioning is an art, not a science—I went to the production office in the “Blue Building” on the Fox lot to read for Glen Gordon Caron, Jay Daniel, and the other executive producers. The show’s casting director, Karen Vice, was going to be reading DiPesto’s lines. Entering the room, I was faced with a long table, Glen seated in the center and the others arrayed on either side of him. It looked strangely like Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” with Glen in the role of Christ, which on Moonlighting was an apt analogy. At the conclusion of my reading, he looked down the table, right and left, and to my utter amazement, everyone nodded in unison. Glen then told me I had the role, but they were going to put me in another room, because there were still actors waiting outside to read for the part and they had to go through them as a courtesy.
Everything after that was a blur, and I eventually headed home, enjoined to show up the following morning to shoot my first scene: a passionate kissing scene with Allyce Beasley.
My phone rang the following morning at about 6:00 a.m. It was my agent. Someone had called from Moonlighting with a question. Was it true Curtis was gay? If so, there was a possible problem. This was 1987, AIDS was rampant and still misunderstood, and since I was going to be—ahem—exchanging bodily fluids with Allyce Beasley, they wanted to know up front which way I swung.
I was speechless. There was no overt threat in this astonishing invasion of privacy. They would not be foolish enough to fire me because of my sexuality—or perceived sexuality—but they could presumably rewrite the scene to excise the passionate necking and the role that had been described as “recurring” could very possibly become “not recurring.” My agent was aware of my heterosexuality but had been put in a position of having to have me confirm it, which I didn’t do. I went to work as scheduled, the subject was not referred to and Allyce and I spent the morning rolling around on a desk as planned. I began to think I’d dreamed it. It was only later that the truth came out.
“I don’t know if you ever knew this,” Allyce told me in an interview in 2016, “but that was Vincent [Schiavelli, her husband at the time]. He really wanted to play that part. He’d already been on the show once, and I think he just thought the part was his. When he found out you got it, he got angry. He called his agent and that whole thing happened.”
Vincent had told his agent that he was pretty sure I was gay. At that time, it was believed by many that AIDS was transmitted through saliva and since I was going to be kissing his wife, he demanded that they intervene and find out first.
* * *
Roger Director was fresh off the game-changing hit Hill Street Blues when he was brought by Glen Caron into the Moonlighting fold. In those early days the writing staff consisted of Debra Frank and Carl Sauter, Roger, Jeff Reno and Ron Osborne, shortly followed by Kerry Ehrin, Barbra Hall, Chic Eglee and others. Roger Director had been tasked with creating the character of Herbert Viola.
“Viola was introduced,” Roger told me during a 2016 interview, “because we couldn’t make twenty-two episodes. Bruce and Cybill had to be in every shot. The schedule was so tough. There was a strain on everyone.” Viola’s relationship with Agnes DiPesto, Director said, “was a logical evolution. But of course we had to wait and see how that played out. You and Allyce turned out to make a good team, so in addition to furthering your own story, you could sort of comment about what, you know, the King and the Queen were doing. And I think it was just thought it might be a good idea if we could have a few scenes in which Bruce and Cybill were not on screen together.
“It was clear that you and Bruce were working well together. Working really well together. It always tickled us to watch dailies when you two were in a scene because he always had such a great manner, always throwing stuff away, whereas you were just super-earnest. He could always impress the shit out of [Viola] with some scheme he’d come up with, or some observation about the workings of the universe that [Viola] found fascinating. You just had this enthusiasm—pure enthusiasm. There was clearly room to develop that.”
* * *
I don’t think I had seen a single episode of Moonlighting before the day I showed up for work. Cybill’s work I was familiar with, of course, but Bruce was just another name I didn’t know. That first morning I was on the Blue Moon office set, talking awkwardly with Allyce Beasley, when Bruce and Cybill made their entrance at the same moment.
That was a rule, by the way, even then: Bruce and Cybill were called to set at the same moment so that one would not have to wait for the other. Later, as the relationship deteriorated, a couple of Teamsters were instructed to measure the exact distance between their two trailer doors to the stage entrance, so one actor wouldn’t have to walk even a foot farther than the other. In subsequent years, I would work on two different shows—Lois and Clark and The Chronicle—both of which featured two stars who boasted to me of having even worse relationships than Bruce and Cybill. Lois and Clark’s Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain even had their trailers measured from the stage door, just as they’d heard Moonlighting’s trailblazers had.
Someone introduced me to them. Cybill was in wardrobe, a shiny blue creation that was mostly shoulder pads. Bruce was barely dressed at all and appeared hungover. As he explained it, he’d been in a club most of the night and overslept. Rather than shower, he just fell naked into his swimming pool, threw some clothes on and actually arrived
at his call time, give or take an hour or so. They were both polite and welcomed me to the set. We blocked the scene and then Cybill vanished. Bruce, looking blearily at me, said, “So what the hell are you doing here?”
Funny question, really, and I was a little unsure how to respond to it. Moonlighting was a critical darling and its followers were passionate and rapidly becoming legion. I responded with the caution of a man crossing an unmarked minefield, little dreaming that that was what I was going to be spending the next three years of my life doing.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a good show.…”
“Hmm,” he said. Noncommittal. “But you do movies.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s the thing,” he said. “If I could do movies, I’d be outta here so fast…”
Well, of course, that was a little peep into the future if there ever was one. I had never done television before, but it seemed to me as the weeks went by that this really was a great show. And for a comic actor, David Addison was just a gift from God. What I didn’t realize was that Bruce was already tired of the David and Maddie schtick and wanted the show to move in a more serious direction that would give him a chance to show off his dramatic chops. The reason that Viola became the role of a lifetime for me was because Bruce was rapidly reaching the point where he would just refuse to do the comic stuff that Glen and the writers wrote for him. All those comic ideas had to go somewhere. So if they needed someone to pop out of a cake in full drag and sing “Lady Is a Tramp” or to be thrown down the length of a laden banquet table and smash into an ice sculpture or lip-sync “Wooly Bully” or do an extended Humphrey Bogart impression, I was their man! It would be a bumpy ride during the next couple of years, but Moonlighting was the last of the four jobs—following Risky Business, Revenge of the Nerds and Better Off Dead—that would establish my career for the next three decades.
Revenge of the Nerd Page 20